A Year In Everything: Juliana Pache

Some of my favorite writing from Black women this year.

Black women were my biggest inspiration this year and every year. We've been shaking the table on pretty much every front: feminism, politics, music, media, and existing in general. The women below wrote insightful pieces that changed my perspective and/or verbalized so many feelings I couldn’t articulate this year.

Roxane Gay

Who Gets To Be AngryRoxane Gay examines who is granted permission to be angry, and how that permission is gendered and racialized.

Zoé Samudzi

Hillary Clinton, Betty Shelby, And “Solidarity” With Powerful White WomenSamudzi writes: “A number of white women claimed it was some kind of inequity that Betty Shelby was charged but not the many, many white men who have also wrongfully killed black people. But is that what gender equity looks like? Does it really look like the ability to similarly deal in fatal anti-black violence with impunity because our sole and unnuanced aspiration as ‘women’ is to be treated the same as men?”

When Black Joy Has White Witnesses“So much of white approval of Black joy is about easing their own white guilt, believing everything’s amended," writes Matti. "It’s about pretending the past doesn’t touch and taint the present. It’s about pretending that legacy doesn’t lord over us.”